The Back-Burner Blockbuster

 
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A young Will Wright sits for a photo.
Being at the helm of the most anticipated game of the year is not what Will Wright imagined when he was growing up in Georgia. The son of a chemical engineer and of a local theater actress, young Will Wright was always a curious fellow. A voracious reader at a young age, Wright loved to build toy models and experiment with robots. He even went through a Houdini phase where he made his own lock picks and thought about becoming a magician. In some ways, constructing lock picks may have been Wright's way of figuratively expressing his desire to break free from what would be a tragic event for any child: the loss of his father at a young age. When Wright was 9, his father, the owner of the Wright Plastics Company in Atlanta, passed away. After his father's death, Wright, his mother, and his sister moved back to Louisiana, where his mother had grown up.

Wright attended high school in Louisiana. Soon after, he set off to college. But formal education never quite agreed with Wright. Over the next five years, he attended three different colleges but never did graduate. At college he studied everything from architecture to mechanical engineering to aviation. He even earned his pilot's license in his spare time. It seemed a diploma was never quite the point. In many ways, Wright was the human Johnny-5 from the movie Short Circuit. He just needed more input; more knowledge to help him uncover how the world really worked.

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Raid on Bungling Bay, Will Wright's first game.
It was at the age of 20 that Wright found a whole new world inside of the computer. He still remembers the day when he played the first Flight Simulator from Bruce Artwick Productions. Since he was an amateur pilot, he became fascinated by the computer's ability to create an alternate world inside a monitor. Two years later, when he was only 22, Wright moved with his soon-to-be-wife to the West Coast and created his first game: Raid on Bungling Bay, a Commodore 64 title where you flew a helicopter around an island. The game wasn't particularly memorable, but it was a stepping-stone to the game that would really put Wright on the map: SimCity.

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Will Wright's first mock-up box design for Home Tactics, the game that would eventually become The Sims.
SimCity, and the company that developed it, Maxis, was Wright's first taste of success. But as we chronicled four years ago in our previous Behind the Games feature on Maxis, SIMply Divine, Wright went through many turbulent times at Maxis. The company went public, the product flow wasn't there, and Wright felt constricted. While Wright had many new game ideas after SimCity, he could never get them off the ground--especially his idea for a dollhouse game, which he had originally dubbed "Home Tactics: The Experimental Domestic Simulator."

The idea for the dollhouse game partially stemmed from the Berkeley-Oakland fire of 1991, in which Wright's home was destroyed along with more than 3,800 others. As Wright and his family went about putting back together their life after the fire, he began to observe the way in which he reacquired items for their new home: First came the refrigerator, then the stove, and so on. In the dollhouse game, you'd do something similar: Design a dollhouse and then slowly acquire objects to put inside of it.

By 1993, a prototype of Home Tactics was ready. Wright had the game running on a Macintosh computer and pitched the project to the Maxis executives during a focus group. That day, four different game ideas were on the table. Wright's dollhouse game was the only one that met with universal rejection. Almost overnight, Home Tactics was shifted to the back burner, with one lone programmer working on it in his spare time.

Rejected Interfaces for The Sims
During development, The Sims went through more than 10 different interface concepts. Here, for the first time, are two of the rejected interface designs.

But the tide turned in 1997 when industry stalwart Electronic Arts bought Maxis. To EA, Wright was the creative genius behind SimCity. The executive team knew Wright's ideas were at least worth exploring. (After all, SimCity was a game that most publishers had initially rejected.) "EA basically came to me and said, 'We're going to roll the dice on you and give you all the resources you want for Home Tactics,'" remembers Wright. That was a dice roll that cleaned house. In January 2000, The Sims came out with little advance word or buzz. Since then, the game has broken all sales records because of its approachable subject matter and its ability to unleash a player's creativity.

What The Sims Could Have Looked Like
These never-before-seen concept images show what the characters in The Sims originally looked like.

Within a year, The Sims became Wright's biggest hit. Moreover, the game spawned an entire online community of players who created unique in-game objects and character skins. "It was very inspirational to me to see all the creativity online," says Wright. So when he was considering what to do next, the success of the online fan community gave him an idea: Why not take The Sims online?

Part II: Simcrash »